The introduction situates the old merchant homes of Gujarat between the Indian Ocean region and South Asia. Setting the stage for the rest of the book, the introduction demonstrates that havelis were embedded within British free-trade capitalism across the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though havelis were framed as domestic and private sites outside of the colonial economy, they were linked to slavery and indentured labor, plantation agriculture, and the mass production of commodities. The rich and unsettled grounds of Gujarat’s havelis reveal that the dislocations of colonial capitalism impacted merchant communities’ sense of place and belonging. While Indian Ocean histories of capitalism have placed an inordinate emphasis on paper records, this book argues that old houses suggest that space was not the background of capital’s history but a primary site of its articulation. Drawing the spaces of homes into relation with a range of textual colonial and vernacular archives, this book challenges our static ideas of belonging and argues for reimagining Gujarat through Muslim and Parsi mercantile communities, their itineraries, and their histories.